Titolo completo

The Other I in FIMI. How Foreign Interference Undermines European Strategic Autonomy

The EU is navigating one of the most demanding strategic environments in its history. Structural pressures, including a war on the continent, accelerating competition over critical technologies, fragile supply chains and a US partner whose commitment has become uncertain have converged to expose the limits of European agency. Efforts to build greater strategic autonomy, whether framed as European sovereignty, open strategic autonomy, or economic security, have produced real but insufficient results: capabilities have grown, but so too have dependencies, and the two have moved at unequal speeds.

Foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) is a structural component of this predicament, yet it remains under-theorised in debates about European strategic autonomy. The reason lies partly in a conceptual asymmetry embedded in the acronym itself. FIMI contains two Is: information manipulation and interference. European policy debates, analytical frameworks and institutional responses have overwhelmingly concentrated on the first while the second has received far less systematic attention.

Information manipulation, disinformation, fabricated content, coordinated inauthentic behaviour on digital platforms is real, documented and damaging. But it is only one tool in an adversarial toolkit that also includes elite capture, corruption, the harassment and surveillance of diaspora communities, cyber intrusion, physical sabotage and the strategic exploitation of economic dependencies. None of these can be properly understood in isolation, they are all facets of the second I of FIMI: interference, which is what holds all these actions together as a coherent strategy.

Taken in its full sense, encompassing both information manipulation and interference, FIMI functions as a structural brake on European strategic autonomy. It does so not only by deceiving citizens or influencing electoral outcomes, but also by degrading the political conditions under which the EU and its member states can identify threats clearly, build durable consensus and act cohesively.

Beyond disinformation: The full interference toolkit

The EU’s working definition of FIMI captures information manipulation conducted in a “coordinated manner” with the intent to harm democratic processes.[1] It correctly situates disinformation within a broader interference landscape. In practice, the operational and policy response has remained anchored in the information manipulation dimension: monitoring disinformation narratives, detecting coordinated inauthentic behaviour, fact-checking and building media literacy. These are valuable actions, but they address only part of the threat.

Physical interference is the most visible component that tends to escape the FIMI framing. Russia has been conducting a sustained sabotage campaign across Europe: arson attacks on logistics and defence facilities, assassination attempts on business leaders and operations meant to disrupt critical infrastructure.[2] Its connection to information operations is direct: physical attacks on infrastructure create tangible insecurity that disinformation campaigns then amplify, attributing blame to domestic actors, questioning governmental competence and feeding narratives of institutional failure.

Recent cable cuttings in Europe illustrate how this works in practice. At the end of 2024, in attacks linked to Russia’s hybrid campaign against European infrastructure,[3] six undersea telecommunications cables and a power cable, connecting Estonia, Finland, Germany, Lithuania and Sweden, were severed within weeks of each other. The main consequence was reduced electricity transfer between the Baltic states and the Nordic grid during winter, as well as the prospect of degraded financial transaction routing, that prompted Nordic countries to begin rolling out offline payment systems as back-ups.[4]

Transnational repression is a second underappreciated dimension. The documented presence of Chinese secret police stations in at least a dozen European countries, the surveillance of diaspora communities via WeChat and the systematic harassment of researchers, journalists and politicians who document authoritarian conduct all serve a single purpose: silencing the voices most likely to generate informed pressure for a stronger European response.[5] The effect is not merely to intimidate individuals but to narrow the epistemic environment in which European policymakers operate. Digital tools, from platform-based surveillance to commercial spyware and coordinated online harassment, extend the reach and lower the cost of these operations.

Elite capture is the third and most insidious component. The systematic cultivation of business figures, former officials, politicians and academics through commercial relationships, sponsored travel, research funding and institutional co-optation creates a structural pro-adversary constituency within European political systems. The aim is to shape the terms of the policy debate before it begins, ensuring that those with access to decision-makers consistently downplay threats, advocate for restraint and frame assertive European responses as disproportionate or counterproductive. Corruption sometimes plays a role, but the dynamic operates well beyond it.

What makes the full interference toolkit coherent as a strategy, rather than a collection of parallel operations, is precisely the interplay between its components. Information manipulation is most effective when it operates in an environment where credible, well-resourced independent media are financially precarious, where researchers face legal harassment and self-censor, where the politicians most willing to name threats have been compromised or delegitimised, and where the psychological weight of physical insecurity suppresses political will. Interference creates those conditions. Information manipulation exploits them.

The technology layer: Platforms, infrastructure and AI

Technology has transformed FIMI operations in three distinct but related ways. Firstly, it has lowered the cost and raised the scale of information manipulation. Secondly, it has created structural dependencies that adversaries can exploit or that inherently compromise European information sovereignty. Lastly, it is beginning to enable new forms of synthetic content generation that may qualitatively alter the threat landscape in the medium term.

Platform architecture is the primary problem. Social media platforms are not passive conduits for disinformation, their engagement-optimised algorithmic design is an active amplifier. Content that provokes strong emotional responses, anger, fear, outrage, is systematically surfaced and spread. This means that well-crafted adversarial narratives, even when they reach only a small initial audience, can achieve disproportionate reach and resonance. The architecture does not discriminate between organic and manufactured virality. The result is that the marginal cost of a FIMI operation has fallen sharply while its potential impact has grown.

Digital infrastructure dependencies constitute a structural vulnerability that is both more serious and less visible than the platform problem. European digital infrastructure remains heavily dependent on a small number of non-European providers for cloud services, content delivery networks and foundational software layers. For instance, for cloud services, US hyperscalers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud collectively hold around 70 per cent of the European market, all subject to US legal frameworks like the Cloud Act that compel disclosure of data regardless of where it is stored.[6] This means that most European data, including communications among policymakers and civil society actors, flows through systems that are not subject to European regulatory control. In addition, the European information space is structured by algorithmic and infrastructural choices made in jurisdictions with different and sometimes conflicting legal, political and strategic interests. The long and still incomplete effort to remove Huawei from EU telecommunications networks is an illustration of how deep these dependencies run and how slowly they can be unwound.

Artificial intelligence is for now primarily an amplifier of pre-existing FIMI capabilities rather than a qualitative break. Large language models lower the cost of producing high-volume, linguistically credible disinformation content in multiple languages. AI-generated synthetic media, including voice, image and video, reduces the technical barriers to impersonation and fabrication. These are significant enhancements to existing capabilities, particularly for actors that have historically operated at scale through volume rather than sophistication. However, the most effective influence operations documented to date have relied less on technological novelty than on strategic patience, accurate audience targeting and the exploitation of genuine political grievances. The expansion of Russia’s state broadcaster RT across European media markets prior to its 2022 ban illustrates this dynamic. The channel built genuine audience traction by giving sustained, sympathetic coverage to constituencies that felt poorly served by mainstream outlets, including French yellow vests protesters or segments of the German public sceptical of pandemic-era restrictions. Its effectiveness came from editorial patience and accurate reading of grievances, not from technological sophistication. AI accelerates and cheapens these operations but does not fundamentally change their logic. What it may change, as capabilities continue to develop, is the plausibility of individually targeted synthetic content, a risk that warrants anticipatory policy attention.

Russia and China: Distinct logics, converging effects

Russia and China represent the EU’s two principal FIMI adversaries, but they operate according to different strategic logics, with different time horizons and different primary targets. Understanding the distinction matters for calibrating European responses.

Russia: Acute disruption
Russia’s interference strategy is oriented toward acute disruption rather than systemic influence. Its primary objective is to fracture European political cohesion, delegitimise democratic institutions and prevent the emergence of durable consensus on issues where European unity damages Russian interests, above all Ukraine, energy and defence. The tools are varied: fabricated narratives seeded through state media and amplified via proxy networks, the exploitation of pre-existing political divisions, support for Eurosceptic and sovereigntist political forces, physical sabotage and the weaponisation of migration and energy flows.[7]

In the context of the green and digital transitions, Russia has frequently targeted the political consensus underpinning the energy transition. Documented Russian operations have featured narratives challenging the economic viability of renewable energy, the attribution of energy price increases to climate policy rather than geopolitical choices and the amplification of farmers’ and industrial workers’ protests against transition costs.[8] Russia has neither the leverage nor the interest to stop the energy transition in the long run. But Moscow can slow it, raise domestic political cost on European governments and erode governing coalitions that depend on it. Energy insecurity, whether manufactured through disinformation or real as a consequence of supply disruption, weakens European staying power and buys time for Russian strategic objectives.

The kinetic-informational nexus in Russian strategy is particularly important and insufficiently integrated into European thinking. Physical sabotage operations against critical infrastructure, including pipelines, cables and logistics networks, and information operations are part of the same broader effort. The sabotage creates real insecurity, the information operations amplify it, attribute it to domestic actors or institutional failure, and use it to argue that European strategic choices, on Ukraine, on energy, on defence, are extracting an unsustainable cost from ordinary citizens.

China: Systemic erosion
China’s interference strategy is less concerned with immediate disruption than with the long-term degradation of the political conditions under which Europe might mount an effective economic defence against Chinese industrial competition. The strategic logic flows directly from the structural economic imperatives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): an economy whose capital flows are controlled by the state and directed toward industrial production generates structural overcapacity, which must find export markets. Europe has become, particularly with the partial closure of the US market, the primary destination for this surplus.[9] The CCP therefore has a direct structural interest in preventing or delaying European policy responses, including trade instruments, investment screening and technology restrictions, that would reduce Chinese access to the EU’s market.

China’s United Front Work Department coordinates a toolkit that is broader and more patient than its Russian equivalent: state media and content-sharing agreements with European outlets, wolf-warrior diplomacy that has given way to more conventionally calibrated but substantively unchanged pressure, the systematic cultivation of business and political elites through commercial relationships and sponsored engagement, and transnational repression of diaspora communities and critics.[10]

Recent cases are illustrative of the strategy’s scope. The Maximilian Krah affair, in which a senior German MEP with documented ties to Chinese government-linked organisations was found to have an assistant convicted of espionage for China, is one node in a broader pattern of political influence in European legislative bodies.[11] The Huawei corruption investigation, which in March 2025 saw raids across more than twenty European addresses and the sealing of two European Parliament offices, reveals how infrastructure access was maintained not purely through technical or commercial arguments but through the systematic cultivation of political support.[12] The harassment of researchers who document Chinese conduct, including litigation against academics and the funding of ostensibly independent research programmes that consistently produce favourable findings, narrows the analytical base on which European policy can draw.

In the digital domain, Chinese-controlled platforms present a structurally distinct challenge. TikTok’s algorithmic opacity and its demonstrated capacity to shape information environments at scale represent a form of infrastructure dependency. European users, including young voters and opinion formers, are engaging with content curated by a system that operates outside any effective European regulatory control. The concern is structural: TikTok’s owner ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing, and the CCP has a well-documented history of compelling Chinese companies to subordinate their operations to party interests, creating a channel for state direction that is theoretical in normal times but not implausible under pressure.[13]

Beyond Russia and China, the EU’s information environment also faces a more ambiguous structural challenge from its main democratic partner, the United States.

The transatlantic complication

Russia and China are the EU’s two main FIMI adversaries, but they are not the only sources of external pressure on European agency in the information domain. Europe depends heavily on US digital infrastructure and platforms, and that dependency has become a problem now that the current US administration is using it as leverage over European regulatory choices, including by pushing back against the enforcement of the Digital Services and Market Acts (DSA and DMA) against US-headquartered companies.[14] When external political pressure restrains European regulatory action, the effect on Europe’s information space is much the same as direct interference, whatever the intent behind it.

A further question, which this brief raises rather than answers, concerns the alignment between the current US administration and major US platforms around the idea that EU digital regulation amounts to censorship. Whether this shared discourse will translate into concrete operational decisions, such as amplifying certain political forces, suppressing pro-EU voices, or otherwise tilting the European information environment, remains an open empirical question. Media reports already warn of US moves to provide grants to European organisations that “support Trump administration causes” and the structural conditions are in place for broader attempts to reshape the continent’s domestic politics.[15]

The European response: Progress, gaps and priorities

The EU’s institutional and regulatory response to FIMI has strengthened substantially over the past five years. The EEAS strategic communications task forces, the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) network, national-level disinformation agencies being built up across member states, and more recently the European Democracy Shield all represent real institutional development.[16] The DSA provides, on paper, a serious regulatory framework for platform accountability.[17] These are not negligible achievements.

Three structural gaps nonetheless remain. The first is the disconnect between the information manipulation and interference dimensions of the threat. European institutions have built, and are still reinforcing, significant capacity to monitor and respond to disinformation. They have built far less capacity to track, analyse and respond to the broader interference toolkit, including elite capture, transnational repression and physical sabotage, and, critically, to map the connections between FIMI’s informational and non-informational components. No serious institutional mechanism currently exists to analyse how a physical sabotage campaign, a corruption network, a diaspora harassment operation and an information manipulation campaign interact and reinforce each other as components of a single adversarial strategy. This is a fundamental analytical gap that limits the quality of both threat assessment and policy response.

The second gap concerns regulatory enforcement. The argument is sometimes made that European regulation of platform behaviour is inadequate. The more accurate diagnosis is that the regulatory framework, particularly the DSA, is largely sufficient but has encountered serious enforcement difficulties. Political pressure from external actors, especially coming from the United States, has made European institutions hesitant to apply their own rules with full vigour. This is itself a FIMI success: when the prospect of regulatory enforcement against major platforms generates external diplomatic pushback that restrains European action, the effect on European regulatory sovereignty is real and direct. The priority here is not new legislation but political will to implement what already exists.

The third gap is in civil society and media ecosystem resilience. This is simultaneously the area of greatest unmet need and the one where investment yields the highest return relative to cost. Independent journalism, local, investigative and multilingual, is the primary mechanism through which FIMI narratives are debunked, interference operations exposed and accountability maintained. European independent media are in structural financial difficulty across most member states: advertising revenue has migrated to online platforms, public funding is subject to political interference in several countries and legal harassment through strategic litigation has become a routine tool against investigative journalists.[18]

Civil society organisations working on disinformation, authoritarian influence and democratic resilience face a related but distinct problem: they are chronically under-resourced, dependent on short project cycles that prevent the accumulation of institutional knowledge, and, particularly since the contraction of US democracy-support funding, facing an acute funding crisis.[19] The EDMO network has provided a useful coordination structure but operates with resources that are modest relative to the scale of the challenge it addresses.

Tech sovereignty, understood as reducing European dependence on non-European digital infrastructure, is a genuine strategic priority, but it operates on a different time horizon from the other responses. Decoupling European digital infrastructure from its current dependencies is a decade-long project at minimum, comparable in complexity and cost to the energy diversification effort launched after 2022. It must begin, but it cannot substitute for the shorter-term responses that the current threat environment requires.

Conclusions and policy recommendations

FIMI is a structural constraint on the EU’s ability to identify challenges clearly, build durable political consensus and act cohesively in the domains, including energy, digital infrastructure, industrial policy and defence, where autonomous European agency is most urgently needed. Adversaries have a direct, long-term interest in slowing or fracturing the European response to the competitive and security pressures that the bloc is currently facing.

The EU’s response has been real but incomplete. Building on what exists, the following priorities deserve particular attention.

Integrate the two dimensions of FIMI institutionally. The European Democracy Shield’s proposed democratic resilience centre should be tasked explicitly with analysing the interaction between information manipulation and the broader interference toolkit. This requires bringing together expertise that currently sits in separate institutional silos: strategic communications, counter-intelligence, anti-corruption and economic security. A joined-up analytical function is a prerequisite for a joined-up policy response.

Enforce existing regulation without hesitation. The DSA provides the legal basis for meaningful accountability of very large online platforms. Political pressure, whether domestic or external, to soften or delay enforcement should be resisted explicitly as a matter of European strategic interest. Regulatory timidity in the face of external pressure is itself a FIMI outcome.

Invest systematically in civil society and media ecosystem resilience. This is the highest-return, lowest-cost intervention available to European institutions. Sustained, multi-year funding for investigative journalism, fact-checking, media literacy and civil society organisations working on authoritarian interference should be treated as a strategic investment, not a discretionary cultural expenditure. Legal protections for journalists against strategic litigation need to be strengthened and, where they exist, applied with urgency.

Begin the long work of digital infrastructure sovereignty. European cloud infrastructure, data governance and platform regulation need to be understood as strategic autonomy issues first, and then as economic or consumer protection issues. The dependency on non-European digital infrastructure for the functioning of European public life, democratic discourse and governmental communication is a structural vulnerability. Reducing it requires a massive programme of investment and policy coherence.

None of these priorities requires the construction of new institutional architecture from scratch. They require political will: to enforce rules that exist, to fund institutions that are already operating below their necessary capacity, and to treat FIMI as the strategic threat it is rather than a communication problem to be managed. Europe is under pressure from adversaries who have understood that degrading the conditions for European agency is cheaper and more effective than confronting European power directly. Recognising that dynamic clearly is the first step toward reversing it.


Etienne Soula is a Brussels-based research fellow with the South and Wider Europe Program at the German Marshall Fund (GMF).
This brief was produced in the framework of the research project “European strategic autonomy and the challenge of new green and digital technologies” supported by the Fondazione CSF and Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo within the Geopolitics and Technology call. The views expressed in this report are solely those of the author.

[1] European External Action Service (EEAS), Information Integrity and Countering Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference (FIMI), 17 March 2026, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/node/410751_en.

[2] Soula, Etienne and Lea George, “Kinetic Operations Bring Authoritarian Violence to Democratic Streets”, in GMF Insights, 5 March 2025, https://www.gmfus.org/node/24152.

[3] Whitaker, Bill et al., “Authorities Investigate Possible Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’ After Oil Tanker Cuts Undersea Cables”, in CBS News, 28 September 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eagle-s-baltic-cut-cable-investigation-russia-ties-60-minutes.

[4] Kauranen, Anne, “Exclusive: Nordics and Estonia Rolling Out Offline Card Payment Back-up in Case Internet Cut”, in Reuters, 7 May 2025, https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/nordics-estonia-plan-offline-card-payment-back-up-if-internet-cut-2025-05-07.

[5] Safeguard Defenders, “10 Overseas. Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild”, in Safeguard Defenders Investigations, September 2022, https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/node/558.

[6] Gineikyte-Kanclere, Vaida et al., “European Software and Cyber Dependencies”, in European Parliament Studies, December 2025, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/ECTI_STU(2025)778576.

[7] Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) website: Authoritarian Interference Tracker, https://securingdemocracy.isd.ngo/?p=2278. This database collects nearly 500 documented cases of Russian interference across North America and Europe.

[8] De Agostini, Leonardo and Caspar Hobhouse, “Fuel, Fear and Falsehoods: Defending Europe and Ukraine from Russia’s Hybrid Energy War”, in EUISS Commentaries, 10 December 2025, https://www.iss.europa.eu/node/3683.

[9] García-Herrero, Alicia, “Europe’s Trade Problem with China is Becoming More Measurable”, in Bruegel Newsletter, 30 April 2026, https://www.bruegel.org/node/12144.

[10] Yu, Cheryl, “Harnessing the People: Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States”, in Jamestown China Briefs, February 2026, https://jamestown.org/?p=870078.

[11] Connor, Richard and Matthew Moore“Germany: Ex-AfD Aide Convicted of Spying for China”, in Deutsche Welle, 30 September 2025, https://p.dw.com/p/51GUT.

[12] Fanta, Alexander et al., “How Huawei’s Lobbying Campaign in Europe Went Rogue”, in Follow the Money, 13 March 2025, https://www.ftm.eu/articles/how-huawei-lobbying-campaign-in-europe-went-rogue.

[13] Hoffman, Samantha and Elsa Kania, “Huawei and the Ambiguity of China’s Intelligence and Counter-Espionage Laws”, in The Strategist, 13 September 2018, https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/?p=41970.

[14] Haeck, Pieter and Océane Herrero, “Macron Says Brussels Is ‘Afraid’ of Tackling US Big Tech”, in Politico EU, 28 November 2025, https://www.politico.eu/?p=7573434.

[15] Skove, Sam, “Can the State Department Make Europe Great Again?”, in Foreign Policy, 1 June 2026, https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/01/state-department-europe-trump-far-right-populist-hungary-orban.

[16] East StratCom, South StratCom and the Western Balkans Task Force. See EEAS, EEAS Strategic Communications Task Forces, 5 May 2025, https://www.eeas.europa.eu/node/105460_en; European Commission, European Democracy Shield: Empowering Strong and Resilient Democracies (JOIN/2025/791), 12 November 2025, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=celex:52025JC0791.

[17] European Parliament and Council of the EU, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market for Digital Services (Digital Services Act), https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj/eng.

[18] Media Freedom Rapid Response, Mapping Media Freedom Monitoring Report 2025, Leipzig, 2026, https://www.mappingmediafreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/MFRR-Monitoring-Report-2025.pdf.

[19] Copeland, Rafiq, Crisis in Journalism. The Impact of the US Government Funding Cuts on Global Media, London, BBC Media Action, June 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/documents/crisis-in-journalism-report-june-2025.pdf.